I haven't posted in a while because the work situation went non-linear. To cut a long (and very boring) story short, I am being made redundant due to my employer deciding to offshore all development.
This outcome is not necessarily a bad thing, but the the mechanics of the redundancy process as enacted by my workplace have been confusing and unnecessarily drawn out. Things career wise have been up in the air for the last couple of months, but now I have some clarity and some breathing space.
As it turns out, I am gong to lose a job that stopped being interesting a couple of years ago, and get compensated enough in the process that I can afford to do my own thing for a few months. I'll probably eventually end up looking for more work, but for at least six months I will have the luxury of being my own boss.
That means that I will have time to start serious work on setting up my own online business, so that is of course what I am going to do. If it takes off then I might not have to look for more work. If it doesn't then at least I'll be spending the next few months on refreshing and honing my full stack development skills.
I'll try and keep this blog updated with my progress, but I don't know how much detail I am going to give away yet - I want to at least get a working prototype together before I start making things public. All I am prepared to say at this point is that the business will be a SAAS targeting corporate customers, it will revolve around Augmented Reality and there is an awful lot of work to do.
One of the things I can share is the current tech stack. The solution is going to be a multi-tier solution with an Angular front end and a dotnet core back end. Although I have enjoyed playing with Vue and Supabase, I pivoted from them for a number of reasons:
1) Angular skills are much more marketable, and choosing this front-end framework will improve my future employability
2) Angular is much improved from when I first started looking at it. The more I play with Angular 19 (and Angular Material) the more I like it for building complex but maintainable front-end solutions.
3) I want full control of the whole stack, and DotNet Core Identity seems to be a great choice for building low-cost multi-tenant solutions.
This stack should enable me to build something that starts small. but can be scaled out over time. I hope that becomes necessary!
Anyway, I am exciting for what the next few months will bring. I have a rare opportunity to be my own boss for a while. I really want to make the most of it.
Oh, by the way. In the interim since the last post I also spent some time on getting some industry certifications in preparation for potential future job hunting. I was able to certify as an Azure Developer Associate and an AWS Cloud Practitioner. I also hope to study and pass the AWS Developer Associate exam before the end of the year.
